Monday, December 22, 2014

The October 11 opening of my exhibit HARBOR at Matteawan Gallery took place one year to the weekend after I executed a series of painted moves that ended up resulting in the base layers on which the Harbor compositions would be built.

This act of painting done on Columbus Day weekend in 2013 was the final "processing" of Advent 2011, the last project to appear on the board of kork. For Advent 2011 I sent postcard images of a 2001 painting, THA to 30 artists and asked them to manipulate the image in the photograph and mail it as a postcard back to the office of Deborah Bailey Browne CPA in Poughkeepsie, where it became an advent calendar marking the end of 2011 and the end of kork as an artspace - and some for some, possibly the end of the world with the apocryphal apocalypse of 2012 then looming on the horizon.

The collected Advent 2011 postcards.

I took all of these manipulated postcards as suggestions for how to improve or destroy the painting in question. The logical final step was to enact these suggestions on the actual painting and see what I came up with.
The video below is a time lapse capture of me going through the motions over the course of three days in October 2013.

After taking the painting through all of the iterations, I cut it up into smaller pieces to be used at a later date. As it turns out, most of the body of this old painting has reemerged in the collective body of of the Harbor paintings which, as a group consist of 15 paintings.

After having chosen HARBOR as the name of the exhibit and the paintings, thinking of the significances of the word, I came to recognize these new paintings tangibly harbor the physical and intellectual efforts of all the participating artists, forming a receptive bed for a new layer of information and making the whole concept worth that much more to me.